I don’t know why nobody is talking about this, but Blizzard’s decision to increase the server population caps is causing for a terrible experience.
Zones are just way too crowded. It’s really hard to find mobs to complete your quests, and any unique mobs are basically just a large group of people competing for the first tag. It seems like Blizzard has increased respawn rates to compensate for this, but that just means you constantly have mobs respawning on top of you while trying to quest.
Anyone else think they should have left population caps closer to the 2005 levels?
Edit: For the record, no I’m not just talking about starting zones. I initially thought it would only be a problem for the first 10-20 levels or so. But I’m 33 now and still having issues.
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Having played on a variety of populations between actual vanilla/tbc/wrath and the private vanilla servers. I do think that Blizzard is over complicating the matter.
Capping at 8-10 thousand would have been the sweet spot. And open up servers beyond that. With no layering. That would have fostered healthy realm growth across multiple servers with definite mob competition but not anything insurmountable.
Instead what they did by adding dozens of layers to a servers with 30+ thousand concurrent players was just…dumb. I get the arguments for it. But I also really don’t get it at all…If they were so so worried about “tourism” to the point where they felt they needed to bork the entire launch with layering. Then they shouldn’t have give BFA players a free pass in and introduced a separate subscription instead. And maybe have a 20$ tier or something for the people who wanted to play both.
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Server caps back in Vanilla were not due to technology limits. They could have put 10,000+ on a server if they had wanted to. It was a design decision to cap them at 3,500. They originally wanted it at 500 and then later wanted it at 1,500. Having this many people on a server is game breaking honestly. The AH is an obvious pain point showing that it just wasn’t designed for this many people. 25k population Server? That should be 8 separate servers. It’s crazy. There are so many people, that for all intents and purposes, it might as well be cross-realm. There’s no way the social evolves at all like the game was intended.
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Yeah this is why I took the free transfer last week to Anathema. It’s a lot less crowded and I can actually do quests!
You think you’ll like them just as much when they take away layering?
They’re probably looking at the long-term and hoping to avoid a repeat of what happened to many of the retail servers.
Yes, high populations cause issues but dead/dying servers are a worse problem for Blizzard to have.
To put that into perspective, here are some solutions for dead/dying servers:
- X-Realm LFG so people can get enough people for a dungeon while levelling.
- LFR for similar reasons.
- Forced server mergers. You may lose your name in a conflict.
- CRZ.
- Free server transfers to the least-populated servers (usually only gives a temporary boost).
1-4 are generally things that very few people want in Classic and most are vehemently against. #5 rarely works.
Allowing high populations is simply a lower long term risk. As long as there are a couple servers without queues, people who “just want to play” can do so whilst allowing everyone else to find enough players to do stuff with even if they have to wait in a queue.
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The extra population increase also came with layering to reduce the clutter of people in an area.
It’s just that competing for mob spawns is a part of Vanilla, especially at launch. The fact that you’re doing this is by design, not by accident of population increases.
You’d be getting the same thing if they launched Vanilla population cap servers without layering.
I transferred from Westfall after dealing with Hillsbrad and STV when you start mixing the factions. It wasn’t much fun, just running all over trying to find quest mobs that hadn’t been killed yet. If not for the free transfers, I might have taken a break to let others level past or worked on a different character and hoped that by the time I made it back to those areas it would be less populated.
Even on Windseeker (my new server), Shimmering Flats was overpopulated and my group ended up having to repeatedly camp for turtles.
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We’ll see in 6 months whether it was a bad idea or not.
Right now, it’s way too early to tell.
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they complained
blizzard cave in
now we wait for they to complain once more because blizzard listened to them the first time
I am starting to wonder about the population die-off. I figured I’d casual it up on WoW Classic, do some “Remember when…” and basically check in every so often. But man, I’ve been pulling some all-nighters, having a lot of fun, and no signs of slowing down- all on one character. I made alts, yeah, but I’m not playing them because I’m still having too much fun on my main. It’s 2004/5 all over for me again. I wonder how many people are in the same boat.
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I’ll agree with this and it’s definitely impacting my enjoyment of Classic. I adore this game but I’ve been frustrated with the inability to play without standing around and waiting for mob respawns. We could really use some elbow room
I’m still getting annoyed now and then with how crowded Atiesh seems to be. But mostly I think that’s because I had gotten used to the initial crowd lasting only a few days with most of the WoW expacs that dropped. So I’m already trained to wait out the initial wave of excited players, just having to extend my patience further out than usual. One nice thing has been server stability. I remember in the past when launch day for an expac meant you’d have your server become unstable and crash whenever it felt like. It was nice not to have that here. (DDOS attacks not included)
I’m mostly just reassuring myself that things will continue to smooth out, even if it happens at a slower rate than I expect. There are some upsides to the huge server. One upside is that finding a dungeon group while leveling up to about level 30-ish, at least, is absurdly easy. Yeah, sometimes you have to wait a bit for a tank if you aren’t already one yourself. Or for lower level dungeons do your best without a tank.
I like that Blizzard had just enough foresight to project the eventual drop-off of players and to try and plan ahead for this in the way that they did. Their implementation was far from perfect, of course. I definitely think that failing to cap full servers to new players/character creation from the very beginning was a mistake. I’d like to think that they’ve learned from that now, but who knows.
My biggest concern right now is “what if” between now and phase 2 the player base actually continues to increase slightly instead of steadily decreasing. Seems like it would put Blizzard in a really difficult position that could almost only be helped by splitting realms. Like restart all the servers and if your server is too big then everyone who logs in has to choose Server-East or Server-West and keep the name pool shared between the two in order to make recombining the two halves easier at a later date. Give people ample warning so guilds and friends can decide which direction to choose when they log in.
Mate they are collapsing layers, causing more folks to be spread across each layer. That’s why they opened up new realms and transfers.
It’s not a population increase, it’s a layer decrease.
Agree. It was great when I nerded out the first few days and got a little ahead of the mess, then I rerolled and was behind the mess, now I’m caught up in the 30s.
Since catching up, I switched from the world to dungeons, hoping to find some fun, and I joined 3 groups in a row with mages trying to figure out the AoE meta and being frustrated that I was not pulling enough or pulling too much when they shouldn’t have a tank. I left dungeons and immediately found myself in Arathi on one of the AoE grinding farms. Break time!
Is this something from a blog post or is this a guess? “Server cap” is open to interpretation, I assumed they left layer size the same. We wouldn’t be seeing an increase in population if layer size were the same.
The only issue is the server imbalance on PvP servers. It just forces players to stay in areas to dungeon farm.
Can’t explore the world of Azeroth if you’re stuck in towns boyo.
Layer size is always the same. If you have 10k across 5 layers, that’s 2k per layer.
If you remove 1 layer, that 2k is now spread among the 4 for 2.5k per layer. You will see more people.
They opened transfers from X to Y.
After the fact X now has fewer people but a higher queue and zones are now more packed.
What do you think happened? Why would zones be more packed if people left? Layers were removed. That’s why. Slowly collapsing the remaining players to fewer layers.
Do you want dead servers because this is how you get dead servers.